How to Type an Apple Symbol in iOS

By Adam Christianson

Sep 11th, 2014 5:00 PM EDT

Now that we have Apple Pay and the Apple Watch it looks like Apple may be moving away from their ’90s “i” branding (which originally stood for “Internet”) to a more modern and corporate branded “Apple” naming scheme.

In Apple’s marketing the company is even using the Apple logo in title text to replace the word “Apple.” So for example, Apple Watch is typed out as Watch. If this is a trend moving forward it’s likely you may have a desire to type out that nifty Apple symbol a bit more in your own communication.

Those who have used the Mac for a while may already know that, in many fonts, you can type out the Apple symbol by pressing the Option+Shift+K keys on the keyboard, but what about on iOS? For many extended keys in iOS you can press and hold a key and get additional alternate options.

For example, pressing and holding the ‘e’ key on the iOS keyboard offers up additional accented versions of the ‘e’. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any key in iOS that you can press and hold to get the Apple symbol. So what can you do?

Luckily I’ve worked out a trick using Apple’s Keyboard Shortcuts in iOS that will have you typing out Apple symbols left and right in no time. Here’s how to do it:

1.) You actually need to start on your Mac by opening Mail.app. Compose an email to yourself and in the body type just the Apple symbol  (Option+Shift+K) and hit Send.

Note: Not all fonts have the Apple symbol mapped to Option+Shift+K, so choose one that does, like Helvetica

Write Yourself a Note

2.) Over on your iOS device open up Mail, open the email you just sent yourself, and copy the Apple symbol from the body of the message.

Copy the Symbol

3.) Go to Settings > General > Keyboards > Shortcuts

Shortcuts in iOS

4.) Tap the “+” in the upper right to add a new shortcut.

5.) In the Phrase field tap and paste the Apple symbol

Create a New Shortcut

6.) In the Shortcut field type any shortcut you’d like that will be replaced by the Apple symbol. I chose ,apl

7.) Tap Save.

That’s it. Now you can simply type your new shortcut in any iOS app and it should expand into the Apple symbol. As you can see in the screenshot below iOS’s auto correct feature will even suggest the symbol as you type the shortcut. Just remember that not all fonts will map that symbol correctly so if it doesn’t work try another font.